That review found that the school had proper documentation for only 6,300 of its 15,300 students - a 59% gap. With ECOT receiving $109 million in state tax dollars last year, the school would owe as much as $64 million.

ECOT officials, as well as parents, students and teachers, objected immediately to the vote. They were not allowed to speak at the meeting before the vote, with the department saying they had ample opportunity to present their case before the hearing officer.

Neil Clark, spokesman for the school, said after the meeting the vote was no surprise and accused the board and department of acting as judge, jury and executioner.

He repeated ECOT's claims that the department did not follow state law in how it calculated the school's attendance. At issue is whether students just need to be "offered" education online or whether the school has to show that they did classwork.

ECOT has maintained that a 2003 agreement with the department calls for it to be paid based on the number of students enrolled in the school. The school was paid for several years if students were "offered" educational opportunities, regardless of whether they took advantage of them.

But ODE last year started requiring documentation of student work and started counting the time students spend signed on to ECOT's computer system as a way of showing class participation.

"Based on its review of a sample of the student log-in records, ODE found that most students logged into ECOT's online platform for only about one hour per day," state lawyers told Franklin County Common Pleas Court last summer.

That's just a fraction of the six to seven hours per school day that students spend at a traditional school.

It's also far less than the five hours per day students should spend, on average, to reach the 920 hours of learning the state requires over a school year, ECOT's own guidelines say.

"Those (ECOT's) records did not substantiate the number of educational hours for which ECOT had billed ODE," the state's lawyers added.

ECOT has maintained in court filings and hearings that the state is violating the 2003 agreement, is breaking the law by seeking hourly documentation without warning and that log-on time is a poor measure of student participation, since it would not show time spent working on lessons offline.